Speaker
Description
Extensive air showers are generated from the interaction of cosmic rays in the Earth's atmosphere and produce radio emission throughout their evolution, which can readily be measured with radio antennas. Reconstructing the full air shower is crucial to understanding the mass composition of cosmic rays, which provides valuable insight on their possible source of origin. While this can be achieved with dense radio detector arrays such as the LOFAR telescope or the future SKA-low array, current reconstruction frameworks can only reconstruct shower parameters that provide limited information on the mass composition and rely heavily on computationally expensive simulations. In this work, we develop an imaging algorithm to reconstruct the 1-D spatial evolution of air showers using measurements from radio detector arrays. We utilise prior knowledge about the physical process of the radio emission to generate a fast-forward model that produces electric field traces at each radio antenna. The reconstruction is performed using Information Field Theory, a state-of-the-art reconstruction framework based on Bayesian inference. We apply our approach with realistic simulated datasets based on the SKA detector layout and analyse the reconstruction efficiency to standard shower parameters to highlight the performance of our model. We plan to extend the framework to reconstruct the full 3-D air shower profile.
| What is your career stage? | Graduate researcher (pre PhD) |
|---|---|
| Which telescopes do you use / are you affiliated with? | LOFAR, SKA |
